Abstract

This article presents a detailed formal approach to concepts and concept combination.
Sense generation is a competence-level theory that attempts to respect
constraints from the various cognitive sciences, and postulates “quasi-classical”
conceptual structures where ottributes receive only one value (but are defeasible
and so do not represent necessary and sufficient conditions on category membership)
and where classification is binary (but explicitly context-sensitive). It is also
argued that any general theory of concepts must account for “privative” combinations
(e.g., stone lion, fake gun, opporent friend) as extreme test-cases of representational
and classificatory flexibility. The approach presented therefore
provides a treatment of these combinations. The approach differentiates between
the “lexical concept” (the stable information represented in a mental lexicon)
which acts as a base from which the various “senses” (flexible contents
associated with words and phrases in context, and used in classification) ore
“generated.” Generation allows nonmonotonicity, so that in different circumstances,
different attributes may be defeated or modified. Classification is
treated as relotive to the perspective adopted, so that a class.ification acceptable
from one perspective may be unacceptable from another, without contradiction.
The result is a view that assumes bottom-up priority in concept combination,
where the range of senses generated by bottom-up rules of combination is
tempered by pragmatic-communicative constraints on classification. An account
of the representational and classification behavior of privotive combinations is
outlined, and the article concludes with a discussion of some of the implications
of the approach.